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Ferring adding Indian plant to its global network

Ferring Pharmaceutical made its first foray into production in the U.S. in 2014, when it started work on a manufacturing facility in New Jersey. Now the Switzerland-based drugmaker is adding India to its list of manufacturing locations.

Michel Pettigrew, president and COO of Ferring Pharmaceuticals, said this week that the drugmaker has a site at Pharma City being developed near Hyderabad, Business Standard reports. In an announcement made at BioAsia, he said the company will spend about $25 million in the first phase. When completed, Pettigrew said the drug development and manufacturing facilities would employ several hundred people. Sources told the newspaper the total investment in the facility could run to $250 million.

"We plan to develop fully integrated facilities here including R&D, commercial and manufacturing units," Pettigrew told the newspaper. "We already have 11 such facilities around the world including in Europe, U.S., China, and the Middle East."

In late 2014, the company initiated the first phase of a $135 million U.S. campus with the expectation that it will be in commercial production this year. It is Ferring's first U.S. manufacturing facility. The privately held company started with 275 people at the campus but expected employment to grow as it gets approval for commercial production there.

The Ferring news came the same week that Japan's Eisai said it would invest tens of millions of dollars to expand production at a plant in Andhra Pradesh to 60 tons a year from the current 30. It intends to sell the extra capacity to Japanese drugmakers. The new lines are slated to be online at the end of 2017.